A look at why men shut down emotionally, how shame shapes avoidant behavior, and how women can communicate needs without triggering the pursuer-withdrawer cycle.

Whenever we become exhausted, disillusioned, and can no longer be sustained by our old fantasies, we have to grieve the lives we did not live, the needs that went unmet, the time that was lost.

What looks like self-sabotage is often a protector doing its best with the tools it has.

Couples tend to get stuck in repetitive communication loops because the conflict isn’t about the present moment. It’s about old wounds — fears of rejection, shame, abandonment, or inadequacy that get triggered in real time.

Culturally, the archetype of the “emotionally unavailable” man is ubiquitous: it’s the theme of countless films, songs, and self-help books marketed toward women. But what many therapists working with men often encounter is something more complex: men who actually feel deeply, but have never been given a language for those feelings, or worse, were taught that expressing them makes them weak or burdensome.